Sunday, March 11, 2018

Booker Book #7: The Conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer

All
the Booker books that I have read so far have been well written, of course, but Nobel prizewinner Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974)
is the first that has made me stop and re-read a beautifully written passage.
Take as a brief example this simile that I had to read twice: “…the sound of
radio music winds like audible smoke in the clean fine morning: it’s Sunday.”
Or the sensory richness of a long passage where our hero Mehring spends New Year’s
Eve alone in a field, watching the lightning and fireworks, listening to
insects, and smelling his absent son in a borrowed sleeping bag.

Mehring
is a wealthy white man in South Africa who bought a farm, apparently on a whim,
as a place to bring a lover, and now seems to feel alive only there. He becomes
more and more withdrawn from his own social group, without ever fitting in with
the colored (black or Indian) folks, either. His wife, lover, and son have all
left him, but he stubbornly comes out every weekend to supervise his farm,
earning him the title epithet.

The
drama begins with a body found on Mehring’s land: most likely a black from the “location,”
another term for township: a shantytown for blacks, rife with crime and bereft
of the most basic amenities. The police find it inconvenient to transport the
body, and simply bury it in the vlei (marsh) where it lies. To me, this unidentified
victim comes to represent all the blacks of South Africa, how cumbersome and
disposable they are to the whites. The locations have become holding pens for
the indigenous, like Native American reservations, but more crowded. The whites
see them as eyesores, cesspools. Mehring
thinks he is a fair man doing the right thing, but we can tell that his more
liberal lover and son both reproach him.

**spoiler
alert**

Then
he takes abominable advantage of a young woman on an airplane, and loses any
respect I might have had for him. Symbolically, the country seems to do the
same. A flood on a Biblical scale unearths the forgotten body, which must be
returned to the earth, properly, in a coffin, and seems to become its new and
rightful owner. Also during the flood, Mehring is feared dead, so his hired
hands must manage the farm without him – which they do quite well. Finally, Mehring
becomes the patsy in a scheme with a seemingly simple lower-class girl, whose
race is unclear.

The
tables are turned. But is justice served? Several times, Mehring remembers bits
of conversation with his liberal lover, who ends up leaving the country –
whether in flight or exile is unclear. She seems to think the whole system must
be overhauled, whole new countries like Namibia established, while the Conservationist
continues to repair, to shore up, to tinker, to distribute gifts and pennies
without really changing anything. Will one captain of industry’s receipt of his
comeuppance change anything either? It’s not clear.

**end
spoiler alert**

I
could keep writing: for example, the story is riddled with images of circles,
in the form of eggs, rings, and peace signs. And I’m sure someone has written
intelligently about this. It’s a deep and delicate novel worth reading, and
reading again.